Tuesday, February 5, 2013

In The Heart

A Love StoryThis is a heartfelt story about love and relationships; it is also about friendship. George Jochnowitz writes: "In the summer of 1986, Alex told me that his fiancée was arriving from China. I agreed to drive to the airport with him to meet her. The day before her arrival, Alex called. 'I'm in the emergency room at Bellevue Hospital. I've been shot. Come over and I'll write her name for you in Chinese characters. Then you can make a sign with her name on it, go to the airport, and pick her up.' "

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by George Jochnowitz

My friend Alex Cai is alive and well despite the fact that he was shot in the heart.

Ever since the first time I taught in China, in 1984, I have had Chinese friends. My ability to speak Chinese is only fair; my reading and writing skills are lousy. Nevertheless, my experiences in China and my knowledge of the language, such as it is, have opened a vast new world to me.

In the summer of 1986, Alex told me that his fiancee was arriving from China. I agreed to drive to the airport with him to meet her. The day before her arrival, Alex called. "I'm in the emergency room at Bellevue Hospital. I've been shot. Come over and I'll write her name for you in Chinese characters. Then you can make a sign with her name on it, go to the airport, and pick her up."

"Where were you shot?" I asked.

"In the heart," he answered.

"You sound very healthy for a man who has been shot in the heart," I said.

"This is real. I've had an echocardiogram. I have a pellet in my pericardium. I will have open heart surgery very soon. Come right over."

I grabbed a cab and arrived at the emergency room a few minutes later. "I want to see Mr. Cai," I said.

"You can't see him. He's in surgery," I was told.

"But I have to see him. I have to find out the name of his fiancee. She's arriving in America tomorrow," I insisted.

"He's in the operating room," I was told.

I tried to think what to do about meeting Alex's fiancee. I remembered that a year or so earlier, Alex had lived with a cousin named Jackie. I decided to call her.

Jackie knew what to do. She told me, "Make a sign with Alex's name in Chinese characters. The girlfriend will see the sign. And make an extra sign for me. I'll go to the airport too, and I'll know you by your sign."

I knew that Alex's name in Chinese was Cai Junxiu, and I probably could could have written it with the help of a dictionary. But I felt insecure. I called another friend, Ting Ning, and told her the story. She agreed to make three signs, one for me, one for Jackie, and one for herself. She would come with me to the airport.

The next day, Ting Ning and I drove to Kennedy Airport. Jackie found us. She said, "I've learned the girl's name. It's Chen Lifen. Let's turn our signs over and write her name on the other side."

We decided to wait in different parts of the arrival area so that the fiancee would see one of us without having to hunt too long. People began to come off the plane. A young man walked up to me and said, "I think you may have a mistake on your sign."

"Why do you think so?" I asked.

"My name is Charles Chen. I'm traveling with a woman named Zhang Lifen. Maybe you have our names mixed up."

I didn't know that the fiancee was traveling with anybody. But I asked Charles Chen, "Does she have a boyfriend named Cai Junxiu?" I turned my sign around and showed him the name on the other side.

"Yes she does, and there she is now," said Charles Chen. I signaled Jackie and Ting Ning to join me. Zhang Lifen came up to us.

"I know all of you," she said, pointing to each of us in turn. "You're George. You're Jackie. You're Ting Ning. Alex sent me pictures of all of you. Where is Alex?"

"He's in the hospital. He's been shot," I said, very frightened about what her reaction would be.

"Where was he shot?" asked Lifen calmly.

"In the chest," I replied. It would have been too awful to say "in the heart."

We got into my car and drove to Manhattan, going directly to BellevueHospital. "We would like to visit Mr. Cai," I said.

"Nobody can visit him. He's in recovery," we were told.

"This is his fiancee," I said, indicating Lifen. "She just came from China this minute."

Lifen was shown the elevator and told to go up to the recovery room. The rest of us were to wait downstairs. It was her first time in an American elevator.

That was Lifen's welcome to America.

The next day there were stories in the Daily News and the New York Post about a 17-year-old man who had been driven through Chinatown and had been shooting at passersby. He was caught because someone had written down the license plate number of the car he was in. I don't know what ever became of him.

In the morning, we were allowed to visit Alex. He told us that despite the surgery, the pellet had not been removed. Apparently, it was in so deep that removing it would have been dangerous. The pellet is still in Alex's heart.

"When you go through a metal detector, you'll beep," I told Alex. I don't think he was amused by my remark.

Lifen stayed with my wife and me for a week. Fortunately, the story has a happy ending. Alex was discharged from the hospital on his 29th birthday. Lifen and Alex are now married and the parents of two lovely daughters.

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George Jochnowitz was born in New York City, in 1937. He became aware of different regional pronunciations when he was six, and he could consciously switch accents as a child. He got his Ph.D. in linguistics from Columbia University and taught linguistics at the College of Staten Island, CUNY. His area of specialization was Jewish languages, in particular, Judeo-Italian dialects. As part of a faculty-exchange agreement with Hebei University in Baoding, China, he was in China during the Tiananmen Massacre. He can be reached at george@jochnowitz.net.

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Yiddish Sites (listed since August 2017)

There are dozens of sites dedicated to Yiddish language, culture and music. Here are some that I have found noteworthy. I will add to the list regularly. If you have a Yiddish site or know of one, please do not hesitate to contact me atpjgreenbaum@gmail.com:

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Afn Shvel(“On the Threshold”), a magazine published by the League for Yiddish, dating to 1941, it is committed to the promotion and preservation of the Yiddish language and culture. It published two double issues a year. Its editor-in-chief is Sheva Zucker;

American Jewish Archive at Hebrew Union College’s Jewish Institute of Religion contains more than 10 million pages of documents. manuscripts, genealogical materials, as well as thousands of audiovisual recordings, photographs, microfilm and digital collections;

Center for Jewish History, in New York City, has 5 miles of archival material (in dozens of languages), more than 500,000 volumes, as well asthousands of artworks, textiles, ritual objects, recordings and photographs;

JewishGen Yizkor Book Project, a database of more than 1,000 yizkor books worldwide, a good number of them have been translated from Hebrew and Yiddish into English;

Language and Cultural Atlas of Ashkenazic Jews,from Columbia University,consists of 5,755 hours of audio tape interviews with Yiddish-speaking Jews from Central and eastern Europe, done between 1959 and 1972 along with around 100,000 pages of linguistic field notes;

Lexilogos, a compilation of Yiddish online resources, including dictionaries, grammar books, and a translation of the Torah (Toyre) in Yiddish;

Milken Archive of Jewish Music, a record of the American Jewish Experience; since 1990, it has become the largest collection of American Jewish music with about 600 recorded works, including a number in Yiddish;

Museum of the Yiddish Theatre, an online museum originating in New York City and founded by Dr. Steven Lasky, has in its collection such items as photographs, theatre programs, sheet music, audio recordings and other documents of some importance and historical significance;

Pakn Treger, (“itinerant bookseller in Eastern Europe who traveled from shtetl to shtetl ”), the magazine of the Yiddish Book Centre;

Recorded Sound Archives (RSA) of Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton contains more than 100,000 recordings of music, a great many in Yiddish;

Songs of My People, a site by Josephine Yalovitser dedicated to Yiddish songs of mourning and of joy;

The National Center For Jewish Film, based at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., is the home to 15,000 reels of feature films, documentaries, newsreels, home movies and institutional films, dating from 1903 to the present; this effort has led to the revival of Yiddish cinema;

Yizkor Book Collection at the New York Public Library provide a documentation of daily life, through essays and photographs and the memoralizing of murdered residents, of Jewish communities destroyed in the Holocaust. Of the 750 yizkor books in its collection, 618 have been digitalized. Most yizkor books are in Yiddish or Hebrew;

YUNG YiDiSH, a site dedicated to preserving and promoting Yiddish culture in Israel;